Florian Müller   Premium-Mitglied

Recently, I advised Real Madrid, the world's number one club in the world's number one sport, with respect to a sports policy initiative of the European Union. I particularly focused on the legal issues surrounding the sale of audiovisual broadcasting rights to football matches. In late 2006, Real Madrid announced a seven-year broadcasting rights deal worth more than €1.1 billion. On 29 March, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the future of professional football in Europe, and the Parliament's plenary carried an amendment (concerning the individuall of football broadcasting rights by clubs such as Real Madrid) for which I was "credited" by Richard Corbett MEP in a plenary intervention and a press release:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

But this involvement with football policy was envisioned from the start to be only temporary. Originally, I am from the IT industry, where my priority project is the development of a computer game (on the Microsoft .NET platform), which I only interrupted (even though for two and a half years) to join the fray and take political action against plans to give software patents a much stronger legal status in Europe. On July 6, 2005, the European Parliament aborted the legislative process by voting down, with 648 out of 680 votes cast, a democratically illegitimate proposal from the EU Council that deserved no better.

My computer game development project has been repeatedly interrupted, but never abandoned. It has always been my dream to develop a computer game of my own, and even more so since I had a highly successful time in the computer games industry as a marketeer. On behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, I launched Warcraft II, Diablo and Starcraft into the German-speaking market. Warcraft II sold more than 300,000 copies (outselling its predecessor by a factor of ten) and topped the Media Control sell-through rankings seven weeks in a row.

On a very few occasions, I took on select consulting assignments that were offered to me. In 2000, I advised three partners of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a "consultants' consultant". In 2001 and 2002, I analyzed two investment opportunities for German and Swedish venture capital funds. Furthermore, I advised the research department of Spain's largest telecommunications company (Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo) in late 2000 and early 2001.